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Review
"Engrossing... As a rollicking chronicle of demented derring-do, Smith's book is hard to beat. His research is prodigious and his eye for a good story impeccable, and his book, while perfectly scholarly, often reads like a real-life James Bond thriller."
--Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
What Smith's excellent book teaches us is the imperative to keep intelligence detached from petty Whitehall squabbles and, above all, to be independent of political influence. --Professor Paul Moorcraft, RUSI Journal
"MI6 has certainly missed a golden opportunity to allow the public an "exclusive" insight into its history. Michael Smith s book covers events in more depth, features the identity of leading players, and affords readers and researchers an opportunity to seek further information. It is a brilliant work - meticulously researched and presented." --Mark Birdsall, Eye Spy Magazine
The tales of the Service s early years, now nearly a century old, are vividly told by author Smith, whose book is full of striking observations and asides. --Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
The tales of the Service s early years, now nearly a century old, are vividly told by author Smith, whose book is full of striking observations and asides. --Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
If you want to know every detail of how Mansfield Cumming, the original C, won the fight with the directors of intelligence to establish the independence of his new service... then Smith's is your book. --Hugh Bicheno, Literary Review
In SIX, Michael Smith takes a broad view, adding new stories, filling in details, using true names and dates, and perhaps most interesting, describing the reactions of government entities to the intelligence they received. --CIA Website
--Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
What Smith's excellent book teaches us is the imperative to keep intelligence detached from petty Whitehall squabbles and, above all, to be independent of political influence. --Professor Paul Moorcraft, RUSI Journal
"MI6 has certainly missed a golden opportunity to allow the public an "exclusive" insight into its history. Michael Smith s book covers events in more depth, features the identity of leading players, and affords readers and researchers an opportunity to seek further information. It is a brilliant work - meticulously researched and presented." --Mark Birdsall, Eye Spy Magazine
The tales of the Service s early years, now nearly a century old, are vividly told by author Smith, whose book is full of striking observations and asides. --Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
The tales of the Service s early years, now nearly a century old, are vividly told by author Smith, whose book is full of striking observations and asides. --Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
If you want to know every detail of how Mansfield Cumming, the original C, won the fight with the directors of intelligence to establish the independence of his new service... then Smith's is your book. --Hugh Bicheno, Literary Review
In SIX, Michael Smith takes a broad view, adding new stories, filling in details, using true names and dates, and perhaps most interesting, describing the reactions of government entities to the intelligence they received. --CIA Website
Product Description
This first part of acclaimed author Michael Smith s epic history of Britain s spooks begins with the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 to prevent German spies uncovering the UK s secrets and provide a deniable team of spies to infiltrate the Kaiser s Germany. It goes on to detail the extraordinary British successes during the First World War of the 1920s and 30s before coming full circle, recording the previously untold work against Nazi Germany ahead of the Second World War. This is the first comprehensive account of the successes and failures of Britain s secret service during the First World War and the critical period between the two world wars when British and Russian spies saw each other as the main enemy . Smith makes extensive use of private and public archives and personal accounts from across the world to reveal stunning new detail on the murder and mayhem carried out by Britain s spooks in the name of the King. Official histories of the first 100 years of Britain s spies remain unable to name the heroes and villains of the spy world for reasons of secrecy, but Smith s account is full of both, revealing new heroes of espionage who rival more familiar names like Sidney Reilly, the so-called Ace of Spies, for their bravery and ability to outsmart their German and Russian opponents and dastardly new villains. This first part of Six examines the murder and mayhem by British spooks that formed the foundations for the greatest intelligence rivalry of all time, between the predecessors of the KGB and MI6, including the remarkable espionage successes enjoyed by Britain s Secret Intelligence Service, stealing the hidden-most secrets of the Kaiser s Germany and Bolshevik Russia and destroying their plans for world domination.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After decades of secrecy over even their chiefs' names, MI5 and MI6 in recent decades have started opening up their records and their personnel to authors of espionage and counter-espionage history. Christopher Andrew's various works played a key role in pioneering the independently written but officially blessed spy histories. Now it is an increasing crowded field with 2010 alone having brought two histories of the early years of what became known as MI6, with Michael Smith's volume Six being one of them.
Written by a former military intelligence officer, with extensive access to official records and good personal contacts, it is a detailed, comprehensive work heavily sourced to official documents and other authoritative sources. Despite this, it is by no means blind to the failings - including often viscous personal infighting and organisational turf wars - of the intelligence pioneers it documents.
There is much of a lively nature to retell - both the bureaucratic infighting and at time eye-watering incompetence of the Secret Service's early years alongside the dramatic stories such as the involvement of British agents in the murder of Rasputin, the larger than life career of the `Ace of Spies' Riley and even the undercover work carried out by popular children's author and journalist Arthur Ransome (of Swallows and Amazon fame but, as Smith explains, also deserving to be remembered for his brave service to the country).
On topics such as Riley and Rasputin, Smith sorts out the credible and the known from the exaggerated and the mythical, but these tales and those such as the smuggling of secrets inside boxes of Belgian chocolates are the exception in the book. For it is dominated by a narrative full of names and organisational changes - making the work a detailed, comprehensive narrative rather than a action-packed volume.
Little is offered in the way of analysis. There was an awful lot of bungling by untrained amateurs as the book makes clear, for example, but it does little to explain why there was such heavy use of untrained amateurs in the first place. It took decades for training to become the norm.
Likewise, we get hints of how poorly intelligence (other than that related to planning and assessing the impact of air raids) was used during the First World War. There are several references to important intelligence being gathered prior to the German army's last gasp 1918 offensive. Yet accounts of that offensive usually do not feature any signs of effective British pre-warning about unit locations and intended tactics. Where did that intelligence go missing? Smith does not tell us. On this and other questions of analysis, the other 2010 volume - by Keith Jeffrey (MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949) does a better job of analysis, even though the Jeffrey volume is lighter on the early years. The ideal early history would include the strengths of both, so if you have a detailed interest in the subject get both, but if you want just the one volume then either is a good pick.
Written by a former military intelligence officer, with extensive access to official records and good personal contacts, it is a detailed, comprehensive work heavily sourced to official documents and other authoritative sources. Despite this, it is by no means blind to the failings - including often viscous personal infighting and organisational turf wars - of the intelligence pioneers it documents.
There is much of a lively nature to retell - both the bureaucratic infighting and at time eye-watering incompetence of the Secret Service's early years alongside the dramatic stories such as the involvement of British agents in the murder of Rasputin, the larger than life career of the `Ace of Spies' Riley and even the undercover work carried out by popular children's author and journalist Arthur Ransome (of Swallows and Amazon fame but, as Smith explains, also deserving to be remembered for his brave service to the country).
On topics such as Riley and Rasputin, Smith sorts out the credible and the known from the exaggerated and the mythical, but these tales and those such as the smuggling of secrets inside boxes of Belgian chocolates are the exception in the book. For it is dominated by a narrative full of names and organisational changes - making the work a detailed, comprehensive narrative rather than a action-packed volume.
Little is offered in the way of analysis. There was an awful lot of bungling by untrained amateurs as the book makes clear, for example, but it does little to explain why there was such heavy use of untrained amateurs in the first place. It took decades for training to become the norm.
Likewise, we get hints of how poorly intelligence (other than that related to planning and assessing the impact of air raids) was used during the First World War. There are several references to important intelligence being gathered prior to the German army's last gasp 1918 offensive. Yet accounts of that offensive usually do not feature any signs of effective British pre-warning about unit locations and intended tactics. Where did that intelligence go missing? Smith does not tell us. On this and other questions of analysis, the other 2010 volume - by Keith Jeffrey (MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949) does a better job of analysis, even though the Jeffrey volume is lighter on the early years. The ideal early history would include the strengths of both, so if you have a detailed interest in the subject get both, but if you want just the one volume then either is a good pick.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a finely written account, so far as it goes, of the British Secret Service (aka SIS, MI6) from 1909 to 1939. I would have given it 5 stars had it in fact been what it says on the cover, a "complete" "1909-1939" instead of being what it in fact is, a good but not complete account which more or less tails off to nothing after 1924.
I learned a lot in places, particularly about the assassination of Rasputin, that rather unpleasant but also misunderstood character. I knew a lady once who, as a young girl, had met several times Prince Yusupov, the main killer of Rasputin. I see from the account in this book that a person was involved of whose presence I had previously been unaware, namely Rayner, a British intelligence operative. It is claimed that Rasputin was not only beaten and killed but, in the interim time, tortured for information wanted by the British. The torture/beating was so severe that, it is said, Rasputin's testicles were "crushed flat". Not nice. The book also claims that the final fatal shot, after Rasputin's still living body was pushed almost under the ice of the winter Niva, was fired by Rayner, from his service revolver (a Webley, like the one shown on the cover of the book).
This story may be credible. Rasputin had opposed the pointless war with Germany (1914-1917) which, again as Rasputin predicted, would lead to the end of the Romanov dynasty and the country being taken over by devils until the "nobles" returned over two decades later (presumably he meant the officers of the Wehrmacht and SS). This last prediction is not in the book.
I should have liked to have given the book the full monty, but how can I, when the section 1924-1939 (1924 meaning the establishment of Soviet power on a state basis as the Soviet Union/USSR ---official foundation having been 1922--) is so slight?
Otherwise, a good read.
I learned a lot in places, particularly about the assassination of Rasputin, that rather unpleasant but also misunderstood character. I knew a lady once who, as a young girl, had met several times Prince Yusupov, the main killer of Rasputin. I see from the account in this book that a person was involved of whose presence I had previously been unaware, namely Rayner, a British intelligence operative. It is claimed that Rasputin was not only beaten and killed but, in the interim time, tortured for information wanted by the British. The torture/beating was so severe that, it is said, Rasputin's testicles were "crushed flat". Not nice. The book also claims that the final fatal shot, after Rasputin's still living body was pushed almost under the ice of the winter Niva, was fired by Rayner, from his service revolver (a Webley, like the one shown on the cover of the book).
This story may be credible. Rasputin had opposed the pointless war with Germany (1914-1917) which, again as Rasputin predicted, would lead to the end of the Romanov dynasty and the country being taken over by devils until the "nobles" returned over two decades later (presumably he meant the officers of the Wehrmacht and SS). This last prediction is not in the book.
I should have liked to have given the book the full monty, but how can I, when the section 1924-1939 (1924 meaning the establishment of Soviet power on a state basis as the Soviet Union/USSR ---official foundation having been 1922--) is so slight?
Otherwise, a good read.
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